Manage multiple app config files during development
You can refer this post for some good practices : Managing Multiple Configuration File Environments with Pre-Build Events
Thinking about the mess of managing multiple configuration files I made this tool: http://envride.codeplex.com/
Its purpose its exactly to make it easier to manage multiple configuration files in an automated way. I would be very pleased if you would take a look at it.
A couple of people suggested using multiple VS configurations, which I think would have worked, except that it would require me to rebuild the solution every time I switched between configurations.
What I did instead seemed a little stupid while I was doing it, but I've been using it for nearly a year now and it works extremely smoothly. In my project directly, I create a separate app.config.XXX file for each customer. The actual app.config file is used solely to generate Settings.cs - it has all of the correct setting names and their default values. It doesn't get copied to the build directories, ever.
Then I wrote a little program that lets me select a customer, and that simply goes through the directories for each project and, if I selected customer XXX, copies app.config.XXX to bin\debug\myprogram.exe.config and bin\release\myprogram.exe.config. As long as this program knows where the root of the solution is (I have to be a little careful whenever I branch the code), it works like a charm.
You can also let Visual Studio automate Robert`s approach by:
- Define a Build Configuration for each client
- In the post build event, simply xcopy app.config.xxx to your bin folder. Where XXX is the name of a Build Config accessible in VS. Something like: xcopy app.config.$(ConfigurationName) $(OutDir)/app.config
VS will drop a distinct build for your clients in separate folders, aolong with the proper config file. bin/Client1/ bin/Client2/